- Richard J. Smith (Rice University) CONTEMPORARY CHINESE LITERATURE AND ART

"The state promotes the development of literature and art, the press, broadcasting and television undertakings, publishing and distribution services, libraries, museums, cultural centres and other cultural undertakings, that serve the people and socialism, and sponsors mass cultural activities."

Article 22 of the Chinese State Constitution

Citizens of the People's Republic of China have the freedom to engage in scientific research, literary and artistic creation and other cultural pursuits. The state encourages and assists creative endeavours conducive to the interests of the people made by citizens engaged in education, science, technology, literature, art and other cultural work.

Article 47 of the Chinese State Constitution

As with past regimes, both imperial and Nationalist, the present Chinese government has tried mightily to control the content of art and literature. From the standpoint of the party and the state there can be no such thing as "pure" literature, no concept of "art for art's sake." Creative works need to serve a social purpose. They must improve the mind, nurture the spirit, and, above all, reflect orthodox (socialist) moral values. As Mao put the matter in his famous lectures at Yan'an in the spring of 1942, art and literature must "awaken and arouse the masses and impel them to unite and struggle to change their environment . . . . What we demand is unity of politics and art, of content and form, and of revolutionary political content and the highest possible degree of perfection in artistic form."

Much more recently, at the opening ceremony of the Sixth National Session of the Federation of Chinese Literature and Art on December 16, 1996, President Jiang Zemin delivered a strikingly similar speech, in which he remarked that the arts and letters in China must reflect socialist spiritual civilization and "bear the imprint of our national character." He went on to say: "What is advanced, scientific and beneficial we should actively absorb, and what is backward, decadent and harmful should be resolutely repelled . . . . Only thus can we make progress and stand firm in the forest of world culture."

It has become increasingly difficult, however, for the Chinese government either to unify politics and art or to resist what it considers to be "harmful" cultural influences. A major contradiction exists between the new individual initiatives, material incentives, competitive entrepreneurial practices and decentralized structures that have contributed to such dramatic economic growth in China during recent years, and the collectivist, conformist, and centralizing impulses that have defined PRC cultural policy in the past. Despite its best efforts, the Chinese state is far less able than ever before to control the content of either local or national artistic and literary productions.

One major impediment to effective control is certainly financial. Since the early 1980s, resources allocated to cultural activities by the central government have steadily declined in real terms, so that many state-run cultural institutions do not even have enough money to pay the salaries of their employees. As a result, commercialized popular culture has begun to assert itself ever more vigorously. Virtually gone is the sense that the writer is the voice of the people or the conscience of society. Increasingly, decentralized market forces are determining the scope and direction of creative activity in the PRC.

The explosion of popular culture has made it difficult for the state to monitor, much less control, literary and artistic production. In 1978, for example, there were only 186 newspapers in all of China; in 1995, the number stood at 2,202. During the same period, the number of Chinese periodicals (journals and magazines) jumped from 930 to 8,135--many of them produced by private commercial firms. In 1978, only about 15,000 books were published in China; in 1995, well over 100,000 appeared, ranging from orthodox political tracts to pulp fiction and even pornography. Although the state still has the capacity to censor or ban certain literary and artistic works, and to punish errant writers, artists, publishers, and gallery owners, public demand now seems to carry more weight in the creative world than the government.

Language and Literature

Before discussing the specific content of contemporary Chinese literature, we should spend a few moments on the Chinese language. Perhaps no single feature of Chinese culture, past or present, has been so intimately connected with Chinese pride and cultural identity.

Spoken Chinese is fragmented into at least a half dozen mutually unintelligible regional dialects, each of which has any number of local variants. The most common dialect, Mandarin (guanhua; usually called putonghua or common speech), is spoken as the native tongue by about seventy percent of the Chinese population, mostly Northerners. It is the official dialect of both the PRC and Taiwan. The other major regional dialects, in descending order of prevalence, are: Wu (spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Yue (also known as Cantonese and spoken in Guangdong), Xiang (Hunan dialect), Kejia (Hakka, spoken primarily in Guangdong, Guangxi and southern Fujian), Southern Min (Amoy dialect; also known in more recent times as "native Taiwanese"), Gan (Jiangxi dialect) and Northern Min (Fuzhou dialect). The differences between these dialects, taken as a whole, are roughly twenty percent in grammar, forty percent in vocabulary, and eighty percent in pronunciation. In addition, they vary in their use of tones, from four in Mandarin to about a dozen in Cantonese.

All Chinese, particularly the Cantonese, greatly prize their local dialects and tend to use them in their everyday speech, despite efforts on the part of the state to encourage one uniform dialect. Periodically billboards appear in cities like Guangzhou (Canton), admonishing citizens to "please speak Mandarin." But local radio and television stations carry at least some programs in Cantonese--an obvious concession to local pride and local linguistic preferences.

In contrast to the spoken language, the Chinese written language can be understood by anyone who has mastered it, regardless of the dialect he or she speaks. Chinese characters are thus like Arabic numerals in the sense that they have the same meaning or set of meanings, regardless of how they are pronounced--one, two, three; une, deux, trois; uno, dos, tres; and so forth--giving China great cultural unity over time and across space. Chinese characters are also noteworthy for their many levels of meaning, and use as different parts of speech. The word jing ¸g, for instance, can mean, (among other things), "warp" (as opposed to "woof"); "longitude;" "vessels in a body;" "to manage, plan, arrange, regulate or rule," "to pass through," "experience or suffer;" "constant or standard;" "classical canon;" and even "suicide by hanging."

For some two thousand years, until the New Culture Movement of the early twentieth century, virtually all of the most esteemed poetry and prose in China was written in what has come to be known as classical Chinese wenyan wen (lit., "patterned words"). This term refers to an extremely terse, elegant and evocative style of writing found in the great philosophical texts of the Zhou dynasty--notably the Five Classics of Confucianism, hence the name "classical Chinese." The great prestige of this form of writing derived primarily from the fact that it was not based on everyday speech. Learning it was therefore not simply a matter of replacing spoken sounds with written characters. Rather, classical texts had to be laboriously memorized, at great expense of time, energy and money.

A huge social gap thus separated those who wrote and read classical Chinese from those who employed the more "vulgar" form of writing based on the spoken language and known as baihua wen (lit. "unadorned words"). Although vernacular writing and classical Chinese both drew upon the same basic repository of characters, they employed them in very different ways. Classical Chinese was far more succinct and far less easy to learn.

Most Chinese characters are comprised of a semantic indicator or "radical" and a phonetic element. The phonetic element indicates the way a written word is probably pronounced (although the pronunciation does not contribute anything to the meaning of the character), while the radical (often originally a picture of something, such as a mouth, the sun, a gate, etc.) suggests the category of phenomena to which the word belongs. These categories--over two hundred of them in all--include animals (humans and other mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, and mythical beasts such as dragons); parts of animals; minerals; natural phenomena and physical formations; structures; utensils; descriptives (colors, shapes, smells, and so on); and actions. To look up a word in a Chinese dictionary requires figuring out what the radical is (not always easy), and then counting the number of strokes the character contains in addition to the radical. Some characters, like the word for a nasal twang or "snuffle," nang, (comprised of the "nose" radical, and the phonetic [nang] ), have literally dozens of strokes. Chinese writers, past and present, have often exploited the "pictographic" elements in Chinese characters to particularly good poetic effect.

Advocates of literary reform during the New Culture Movement managed to make the written vernacular the official language of instruction in China by the year 1920. Their aim was not only to enhance popular literacy but also to undermine the pervasive influence of the discredited Confucian classics. During the 1930s, the Chinese Communists began simplifying the written language further, by creating words that had fewer strokes than "standard" characters. This effort, derived from non-Communist precedents, was based initially on the cursive form or "grass-style" of traditional Chinese calligraphy. The CCP took this effort much further, however, simplifying words which had no counterparts in the cursive style. Thus, for example, became . At the same time, Mao and his comrades tried to simplify the style of Chinese writing, to make it more accessible to "the masses."

Up to the time of Mao's death, most writing in the PRC tended to be rigid and formulaic, with a prescribed, politically oriented vocabulary, a fixed and predictable symbolism, and a bland, rather ponderous style. This so-called "Maoist genre" (Mao wen ti)--heavily influenced by literal translations of the Marxist classics and handbooks for Party officials specifically designed to show them how to speak and write--served as a formidable obstacle to the development of an authentic and vibrant Chinese literary voice.

Michael Schoenhals has discussed at length the formalized language of Chinese politics and the way that it was used as an instrument of state power. Stock phrases such as "the great, glorious, correct Communist party" were used repeatedly, and they had to be employed in just the right way, without any deviation in word order. This type of "bureaucratic" Chinese, as Perry Link and others have pointed out, can still be encountered in official newspaper and radio reports, and is quite distinct from the colorful "unofficial" language of everyday Chinese life. These two types of discourse, official and unofficial, differ not only in content, style and vocabularly, but also in grammar. Recent books such as Outrageous Chinese by James J. Wang, and Mutant Mandarin by Zhou Yimin and James J. Wang, provide an excellent introduction to the color, vitality and flexibility of Chinese "street slang."

After 1978, the "Open Policy" vastly expanded the menu of linguistic and stylistic possibilities available to Chinese writers. It represented a "new era" of creativity, under the banner of the revived slogan: "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom; Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend." "Scar Literature" inaugurated this era by documenting the physical and psychological horrors of the Cultural Revolution--drawing upon, and in turn refining, the bold language of the "big character" posters that sprang up everywhere in the PRC during the late 70s. "Reportage Literature," a related genre which emerged about 1979 and straddled the boundary between journalism and fiction, focused on other, more contemporary, problems in China, from official corruption and bureaucratic bungling to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. It was also known as "the New Realism."

At about the same time "Misty Poetry" became popular in China. Using veiled political references and private imagery, rebellious "experimental" poets such as Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Yang Lian and Shu Ting broke radically with the standard themes and linguistic clichés of the "Mao-genre." Instead, they employed unconventional symbols, multiple viewpoints, and techniques of distortion, evasiveness and montage to create a distinctively Chinese form of surrealism. They tortured logic, used erroneous grammar, and deliberately aimed at density and obscurity. At the same time, their works remained distinctly "Chinese." Bei Dao, one of the most famous of the Misty poets, claimed in a 1992 interview that what he called the "pictographic" nature of Chinese characters seemed especially well suited to his "misty" style of poetry.

As Chinese writers self-consciously tested the limits of both state censorship and public taste, the language of print culture became ever more colorful, and the traditional boundary between "elite" and "popular" literature began to blur. Colloquial expressions, including the use of dialects and other localisms, found their way increasingly into Chinese writing. Humor became fashionable in literary productions, as did both sex and violence. A flood of new terms and expressions washed over Chinese readers, often introduced by influential periodicals such as Reading--the Chinese equivalent of the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement . Some new phrases were technical and critical (many of them borrowed from the West); others were drawn from "street slang;" still others came from the realms of advertising and popular culture. Products with cleverly constructed names, such as Coca-Cola (Kekou kele; lit., "palatable and pleasing") became instant cultural icons--the source of inspiration for both art and literature. Even clothing--"cultural tee-shirts," for instance--revealed new styles of popular discourse, inspired ironically by a Japanese dictionary of new Chinese words and phrases.

Some writers even began to poke fun at the stock phrases used by the Party. The famous "hooligan" author, Wang Shuo, for instance, whose energetic prose weaves together classical phrases, "Mao-speak" from the Cultural Revolution, and the rich, colorful textures of Beijing street patois, wrote a sarcastic short story in 1989 in which the deferential citizens of a back alley fashion an absurd string of literally dozens of official-sounding clichés in their letter to a Party leader. The string begins with the phrase "Respected, wise, dear teacher, helmsman, pathfinder, vanguard, pioneer," then moves to "speeding through the skies, powerful and unrestrained, staving off disaster and helping the poor, dispelling evil and ousting the heterodox," and finally ends hilariously with "driving off rheumatism and cold sweats . . . settling the stomach, relieving pain, suppressing coughs, [and] curing constipation." Small wonder Wang has been criticized by party officials for undermining the "purity of the Chinese language. At another level, two young scholars, Zhang Weiping and Wu Xiaoying, responding to new market forces in China, coined the phrase "Long live the customer!"--an obviously ironic twist on the old revolutionary catch-phrase, "Long live Chairman Mao!"

During the 1980s, Western books in translation became the rage in China. Many were recent literary "classics," ranging from "modernist" authors such as James Joyce, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf to "post-moderns," including Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Jorge Luis Borges; other works had a more philosophical or scholarly orientation (such as the writings of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty); still others focused on pragmatic concerns--often related to business (Lee Iacocca's autobiography proved to be particularly popular in the late 80s, just as Bill Gates's autobiography has been in the late 90s). Popular novels by authors such as Erich Segal, Arthur Hailey, and Jackie Collins, were enjoyed primarily as light reading. Meanwhile, a bewildering variety of literary magazines appeared, carrying a huge traffic of critical essays and translated articles.

Collectively, these Western works had a impact on Chinese readers that went well beyond the introduction of new names, titles, terms and literary themes. The more intellectually oriented among them introduced new world views and methodologies, shaped scholarly discourse, raised consciousness, and generated intense cultural debates. And even "light" fiction came to be valued, at least by some, as an authentic reflection of foreign life. Party-sponsored efforts to combat the decadent "bourgeois liberalism" that these works represented had little long-term effect.

Among the most influential Western works of the 80s (according to a Hong Kong author by the name of Han Shi, who wrote a book in Chinese called The Eighties: Thirty-Three Books That Changed China [1992]) were: Alvin Toffler's, The Third Wave , Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams , Hendrik Willem van Loon's Tolerance , Ernst Cassirer's An Essay on Man , Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover , Simone de Beauvoir's, The Second Sex , Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness , Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being , Henry Havelock Ellis's The Psychology of Sex , Mikael Gorbachev's Perestroika , Richard Nixon's 1989, Victory without War , Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies , and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom . Together, these books suggest a philosophical (as well as a psychological) preoccupation with the future, identity (personal, cultural and national), morality, romance, sexuality, politics, and economic change. These issues continue to preoccupy many Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s.

The Legacy of the 1980s

The major literary and intellectual fashions of today's China have grown out of the "Cultural Fever" of the 1980s. The 90s, however, have witnessed an ever greater variety of styles, themes and genres, as well as a somewhat greater interest in China's past, and a spate of nationalistically inspired works. The writings of the 90s also seem to reflect less of a self-conscious debt to foreign authors--perhaps in reaction to the massive importation of Western literary and cultural theories in the previous decade.

As indicated briefly above, the 80s were a time when Chinese writers and other intellectuals grappled earnestly and relentlessly with the complexities and contradictions surrounding concepts such as "tradition" and "modernity." Although seemingly straightforward, these terms naturally meant different things to different people. Tradition, for instance, might be viewed as a negative force, impeding China's political and economic development, or it might be seen as a source of great cultural strength and spiritual inspiration. Similarly, "modern" could simply mean "like the West" (is Russia, some asked, "Western?") or it could refer to a distinctively Chinese pattern of historical evolution--what Gan Yang, a leading cultural critic of the 80s, once referred to as "the alternative modern."

On the whole the term "modernism" has had positive connotations in post-Mao China. In discussions of economic development it generally refers to progressive change, marked by technological advancement, greater efficiency and greater productivity; in discussions of philosophy it connotes Englightenment-style democratic thought and the primacy of reason; and in art and literature it suggests a a self-conscious break with past models (including nineteenth and early twentieth century genres of "realism") and the search for new, creative forms of expression. As a specific literary term, "modernism" usually refers to "avant-garde" or experimental writing, with strong thematic implications of alienation and isolation.

Not surprisingly, modernist notions of historical and intellectual change engendered a wide variety of responses during the 1980s. Advocates of "total Westernization," as in the New Culture era, mercilessly castigated Chinese "tradition" for delaying China's modern development, but other intellectuals saw greater promise in China's past, embracing the notion of a Chinese-style "Enlightenment." Their idea, which has received at least qualified support from a number of Western scholars, is that in late 16th and 17th century China, certain "progressive" thinkers--notably Mei Wending, Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi and Wang Fuzhi--displayed a decidedly "modern" approach to learning, one that emphasized rationality, objective investigation ("evidential research") and practical application. Advocates of the so-called "Enlightenment School" claim to have rediscovered in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties an embryonic "democratic consciousness" and a "scientific spirit" that owes nothing, or at most very little, to the West.

Motivated by the same impulse to find historical equivalency, other scholars have tried to show that literary techniques such as "stream of consciousness" can be traced to early Chinese writers, such as the poet Li Shangyin of the Tang dynasty. These efforts to discover something "modern" about premodern China indicate how thoroughly Western-inspired notions of modernity have affected Chinese discourses in the 80s and 90s.

Much of the literary production of the "new era" bespeaks a May Fourth (New Culture) brand of modernism, marked by shame over China's "material poverty," and concern over "its moral paralysis." To the Misty Poets, for example, the "five thousand years of Chinese civilization" have turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, culminating in a Communist "dynasty." Yet many of these same poets continued to hold out great hope for the future. One exponent, Hong Huang, wrote enthusiastically in 1980:

A new kind of poetry has been born. . . . It has been given a variety of names: symbolist, surreal, "misty," even impressionist. In fact it is none of these. We should rather call it a new embodiment of our national spirit, the voice and pulse of the thinking generation, a reaction against the poetic disease of the past two decades.

A truly vital self, one endowed with human dignity, intellect and a complex inner life, has appeared in poetry; poetry is no longer hack literature, no longer the mouthpiece of politics. Now we are standing face to face with our land, imbued with suffering and yet full of hope; we muse on this sorrowful but radiant dawn; now we need our own stance, our own voice.

The final lines of Bei Dao's otherwise dark and defiant poem, "The Answer," reflect similar sentiments:

A new juncture and glimmering stars

Adorn the unobstructed sky,

They are five thousand year-old pictographs,

The staring eyes of future generations

Advocates of the so-called "Root-Seeking Literature" of the 1980s--including A Cheng, Han Shaogong, Jia Pingwa, Li Hangyu and Mo Yan-- were more nostalgic than the Misty poets but, likewise inclined toward the use of creative and unorthodox imagery. Theirs was a conflicted vision of the Chinese past, neither "traditionalist" nor "modernist," yet possessing certain elements of each. Jing Wang aptly describes A Cheng, author of the ground-breaking and highly appealing novella, The Chess Master (1984), as "unwilling to make the choice between the Dao and the Now."

Emphasizing the expressive power of the Chinese language, and adopting an intuitive approach to their subject matter, the Root-Seekers reveled in ancient Chinese philosophy and myth; they advocated a return to (or an "escape into") nature, and aimed at rediscovering the Chinese language and recovering lost innocence. As described by the literary critic Huang Ziping, Root-Seeking Literature celebrated "the aesthetic situation, the atmosphere, the cultural sedimentation, . . . [and] the unrefined, wild and basic beauty in the crude, primitive mode of [Chinese] life," all of which they bathed in what Huang calls "the aura of the poetic." Their goal, in short, was to "search for our roots in order to have a dialogue with the world"--that is, to enable "authentic" Chinese literature to become an integral part of the global literary scene.

Mo Yan's well-known novel, Red Sorghum (1986; translated by Howard Goldblatt), provides one illustration of the way Root-Seeking writers have negotiated the tension between traditionalism and modernism. Although Mo's work reveals a fascination with certain "modernist" notions of irrationality and sexuality, it also seems to celebrate a primitive consciousness, marked by rural "superstition," totemism and shamanistic magic. As Mo tells us in his powerful novel, the Chinese countryside is "unquestionably the prettiest and the ugliest, the most other-worldly and the most mundane, the most sacred and the most profane, the most heroic and the most contemptible, the most hard-drinking and the most romantic place on earth." Han Shaogong paints a similarly complex portrait of rural life in his novella Pa Pa Pa (1985; translated in Homecoming? and Other Stories by Martha Cheung). Mainland critics have read this work in a variety of ways--some, as satire; others, as cultural critique; still others, as a nostalgic "mood poem." Later works by Root-Seeking authors, including Mo's Full Breasts and Fat Bottoms (1996) and Han's Horse Bridge Dictionary (1996) suggest that this sort of fiction still has considerable vitality.

"Experimentalist" novelists, including Ge Fei, Yu Hua, Can Xue and Su Tong, have reacted strongly against the utopian flirtations of the Root-Seeking School. Declaring their independence from the literary establishment, and stretching the limits of "taste" with their depictions of various perversions, including sadism and cannibalism, they have exposed the dark side of contemporary China without the high-minded concern for human dignity, social justice and national development characteristic of most Scar Literature, Reportage Literature, and Root-Seeking Literature. In the words of Su Tong, "It is the critic's job to make comparisons between fiction and society, not the writer's."

Can Xue's novella "Yellow Mud Street" (translated in Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas , by Ronald Janssen and Jian Zhang) captures the dark experimentalist theme of hopelessness in economical brushstrokes:

In the attics of the small dark huts, the citizens drowsed. They drove away flies with lazy motions of their fly-swatters. Sometimes they would raise the swatters high and yell at the rats crawling toward the table, "I haven't died yet!" Occasionally the looudspeaker on the street started up. shaking the air and shattering their eardrums . . . .

Though they listened attentively, they could understand nothing.

Some critics have pronounced Can's fiction virtually "unreadable," but she has been a powerful presence on the Chinese literary scene, along with a number of other talented women writers, including Shen Rong ("At Middle Age" [1980]), Zhang Jie ("Love Must Not be Forgotten" [1979] and Heavy Wings , translated by Howard Goldblatt), and Wang Anyi ( Three Loves and Love in Brocade Valley [1988]).

The early works of Yu Hua are particularly well-known for their detailed descriptions of physical violence and bodily mutilation. Stories such as "1986" (1987), "The Past and the Punishment" (1987) and "One Kind of Reality" (1988) evoke, in the words of Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, a "cold and callous world of death and severed limbs." In Yu's fiction, the kind of commiseration and moral reflection that one might expect of at least some characters is replaced with a focus on sounds and surface details--ants crawling in blood, the thud of bodies falling to the ground, bones breaking and organs rotting.

Su Tong--best known for his novella, Wives and Concubines (1990), his novel Rice (1991; translated by Howard Goldblatt), and several disturbing short stories involving children--is, like Yu Hua, famous for offering his readers graphic depictions of sex and violence. Although Rice is a comparatively "realistic" work, it is full of evil deeds which are described in ornate detail, and, characteristically, from a distance. In a 1997 lecture and interview, timed to coincide with the Dutch translation of Rice, Su remarked of the work: "Despair and solitude may be called my themes." He went on to say, however:

Of course you could [also] regard my novel as an exploration of evil. That is why I have consciously exaggerated the evil . . . . [But fiction is a useful means to explore the possibilities of things, to pursue an idea to the very end in order to see where it goes. I guess I wanted to make my readers aware of the possibility, the potential of evil.

Wang Shuo represents the shift from the "new era" of the 80s to the "post-new era" of the 90s--an age of commercialization, satire and self-mockery. Wang's characters, the by-products of China's market economy, make fun of intellectuals, formal education, powerholders and official culture, while they spend their time swindling, drinking, gambling, bragging, and seducing women. Not surprisingly, people in China are divided over the "Wang Shuo phenomenon." Although he remains something of a superstar on the Chinese pop culture scene, at least in the North, some people find his nihilism and anti-intellectualism disturbing. Wang professes not to care. In an interview in Asiaweek (August 9, 1996), he denounced intellectuals for "doing too many bad things in China," and freely admitted that his work "has no moral principles."

The best known of Wang's twenty or so novels, Playing for Thrills (1988; translated by Howard Goldblatt), features one of his typical protagonists, Fang Yan, a con artist who lives in a sensual shadowland, where eating, drinking and sex are the only anchors in a life devoid of meaningful values and individual human connections. In this environment, Fang and his fellow hooligans act and sin together, presenting a bleak vision of the morally bankrupt world apparently created by Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. A distinctive feature of Wang's narrative style is the recounting of events from multiple perspectives, calling into question, in true post-modern fashion, the trustworthiness of any single point of view. Nothing in the novel can be taken at face value, and dreams and reality intermingle indiscriminately.

Wang Shuo is one of the nearly two dozen Chinese authors identified by Han Shi as having had a transformative effect on China in the 1980s. Most of these individuals, like Wang, are Mainland writers, including not only scholars such as Zhou Guoping (author of an influential book on Frederich Nietzsche) and the two sociologists who wrote The Fourth Generation , but also such well known poets and fiction writers as Bei Dao, Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang (authors of River Elegy ), and Zhang Xianliang (author of Half of Man is Woman [1986] and Getting Used to Dying [1989], both translated by Martha Avery).

Zhang's work--a challenging combination of both modernism and realism--explores the relationship between sex and politics in Maoist and post-Maoist China. In Half of Man is Woman , the context is a prison labor camp during the Cultural Revolution, a cruel, dehumanizing environment which serves as the metaphor for an oppressive and pervasive political system that renders all Chinese citizens mentally and physically impotent. In Getting Used to Dying the protagonist, a rehabilitated writer in the author's own image, lives a promiscuous life, sleeping around with many different women in pursuit of a sexual freedom that is tantamount to socio-political freedom. This latter work has been compared in certain respects with James Joyce's A Portrait of a Young Man and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis .

Three of the Chinese writers identified by Han Shi as being particularly influential in China during the 1980s are from Taiwan--namely Bo Yang, Qiong Yao, San Mao. In the latter part of the decade, romantic tear-jerkers by Qiong Yao and San Mao were the rage among young readers on the Mainland, but it was Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinese (originally published in Taiwan in 1985 and then reprinted in the PRC in 1986; translated as The Ugly Chinaman by Don Cohn) that had the most powerful and immediate impact. In this devastating series of satirical essays, Bo Yang lampooned the Chinese people, describing them as noisy, dirty, crude, quarrelsome, dishonest, ill-mannered, cruel and contentious--conformists incapable of originality or independent thought and unwilling to admit mistakes. Although his book engendered a fierce storm of protest, it also resonated powerfully with many Chinese readers in a period of intense self-criticism.

Of course many of the most popular works of literature in China during the 1980s and especially the 90s have been written purely for entertainment--and for substantial profit. Consider, for example, Jia Pingwa's best-selling novel, The Abandoned Capital (1993), which revolves around the aimless escapades of a jaded writer against a background of urban vice and corruption. This cynical, sexually explicit work, written by a highly respected "Roots-Seeking" author, sold at least 500,000 copies within the first few months of its publication, after which it was officially banned by the state authorities (although bookstall dealers continued to peddle it briskly). According to the critic, Zhang Yiwu, the appearance of Jia's novel was a watershed event in China, in effect obliterating the distinction between "high" and "low" in Chinese literature.

The success of The Abandoned Capital also demonstrates how the dynamics of the marketplace have frustrated China's literary censors. According to official state figures, during a major state crackdown in 1991-1992, more than 30 million illegal books and magazines, including some 200,000 works of "pornography," were seized. Yet the tide of threatening works could not be stemmed. Although the Beijing Press and Publications Bureau denounced Jia Pingwa's book as "cluttered with pornographic and sexual references," the author cleverly evaded harsher criticism by liberally sprinkling his novel with blank spaces, indicating that at these points he had excized anywhere from a few to several hundred words. These tantalizing omissions did not appreciably diminish the book's erotic content; indeed, Jia's seemingly self-imposed censorship may have enhanced its salacious appeal.

Wang Meng, one of China's most prolific writers and a highly respected literary critic, has made the point that in his country, as in the contemporary West, literary "success" has become ever harder to define, with bestsellers that are spurned by critics and critically acclaimed works that have disappointing sales. It is perhaps significant that Wang's own novels do not sell particularly well, although his critical essays and short stories have been quite influential.

Wang, a former Minister of Culture in the PRC, is perhaps best known for his pioneering "stream-of-consciousness" style, which the critic Xu Xidong argues is not intended as a Western-style inquiry into the human subconscious, but rather as a way of creating a "topsy-turvy" picture of China's political reality. Nothing escapes Wang's scrutiny; politics, tradition, family, academic life, fashionable theories, Chinese medicine and Western technology are all equally subject to sarcastic interrogation. His style has been aptly described "dialectic absurdism."

Wang's short story, "The Stubborn Porridge," contained in a collection titled Kitty and Other Stories (translated by Zhu Hong), reveals his carefully crafted satirical voice. The issue is what kind of breakfast to serve--Chinese or Western--and how to make the choice? He writes:

"As I see it," my First Cousin's Husband began, "the basic issue . . . is not what we eat, but who makes the decision and by what process this decision is arrived at. Through the feudal patriarchal order? By seniority of age and rank? By leaving things to anarchism? By relying on whims and caprices of the moment? According to published menus? [ . . .] Let me tell you, the Key is Democracy. Without Democracy, you won't know the taste of what you're eating no matter how good it is. Without Democracy, nobody will make a stand for reform no matter how vile the food is. Without Democracy, one can only eat in an unenlightened way, not knowing the sweetness of sugar nor the bitterness of bittermelon.

[ . . .] In a word, without Democracy there is no choice, and without choice the Conscious Subject is alienated from its own identity."

The author interjects: "All this is fine, but what are we to do?"

"Make a stand for Democracy!" he cried, "Hold Elections! Democratic Elections, this is the key, the acupuncture point, this is the nostril of the bull where you insert the ring, this is the central link of the chain! Everybody run for Elections! Let everyone make an election speech, like bidding for a contract: how much you charge, the kind of food you will supply, the obligations of the members of the family who join your program, how much you expect to get paid. Everything must be Open, Transparent, Codified, Documented, Legalised, Programmed and Systemised. Let the Ballot decide! Let the People cast their vote! Let the Majority rule! The minority must give in to the Majority. This principle in itself is an indication of a new concept, new spirit, new order, offsetting Rigidity on the one hand, and Anarchism on the other!"

Some popular works of fiction appeal directly to Chinese nationalism. Glen Cao's best-selling novel, A Beijinger in New York (1991; translated by Ted Wang), which has also become a popular television series, clearly reflects such sentiments. So does Yuan Hongbing's Wind on the Steppes (1990), which promotes controversial themes of racial strength, male power and "national renewal." As Yuan puts the matter graphically: "This race that dwells on the continent of East Asia once shown with a brilliance bestowed by the sun. Now, it has its back to the icy wall of history . . . . We must prove whether we are an inferior race or not, for now fate is pissing in our faces."

The quality of most science fiction in the PRC remains rather low. Such works were heavily criticized during the campaign against spiritual pollution in 1983 and the genre has never fully recovered from the sting. Moreover, Chinese science fiction suffers from the restrictive principle that it supposed to popularize "known scientific facts." Hence, most sci-fi writers in the PRC are either engaged in scientific research or devoted to the popularization of science; few can be described as professional writers. For these reasons, annual production of science fiction in China has generally been less than fifty titles per year since 1984.

Chinese martial arts fiction, by contrast, has blossomed in the 1980s and 90s. Significantly, these works appeal to intellectuals as well as to the general public. An article in the People's Daily (March 3, 1989), explains why:

The traditional sense of mission and social responsibility of Chinese intellectuals binds them, making them itch to do something with their lives . . . . Within the great dramas of the martial arts novels they can find an impassioned and forceful release, even if the actual fighting is fairly meaningless. The heros of these novels do not have to concern themselves with distinguishing good from bad, nor do they care one whit for convention, ceremony or law; they do what they feel like doing, have no regrets and no complaints. Although they endure incredible hardships, in the end, poetic justice is always theirs . . . [providing a certain kind of spiritual comfort.

Although the Mainland has produced a number of accomplished writers of martial arts fiction, the most popular practitioner among PRC readers today is probably Jin Yong, a Hong Kong resident, whose works of knight-errantry are ingeniously conceived, well-written, erudite and realistic. One of Jin Yong's classics, the Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain (translated by Olivia Mok), has gone through twelve editions since it was first published in 1959. It has also been made into a television series and a feature film. Set in the Qing dynasty, the story revolves around the efforts of contending martial arts groups to find the treasures hidden by the famous Ming dynasty rebel, Li Zicheng, who, as all Chinese readers know, established the short-lived Shun dynasty in Beijing during 1644, only to have the invading Manchus dislodge him from the capital later in the year.

Traditional novels have also proven popular in the 1980s and 90s, along with ancient philosophical works such the Analects , the Way and Its Power , and the Classic of Changes . The reason seems to be, as the Guangming Daily suggested in an article dated August 31, 1994, that a fever for the revival of China's "cultural tradition" and "national spirit" has swept across the land. Particularly appealing, as in pre-Liberation times, are four famous novels from the Ming-Qing period: Romance of the Three Kingdoms , with its themes of sworn brotherhood, loyalty, personal ambition, and righteous revenge; Water Margin , similarly full of courageous and righteous military activities; Journey to the West , a colorful adventure story and Buddhist allegory; and, of course, the Dream of the Red Chamber , a microcosm of traditional Chinese culture--generally considered to be China's greatest traditional novel. The latter work has even inspired theme parks in Beijing and Shanghai.

Some Misty Poets have also succumbed to the lure of Chinese tradition, Yang Lian, for instance. To be certain, Yang's poems (translated by Brian Holton, Mabel Lee and others) have a certain "international" quality, derived, no doubt, from his unusually cosmopolitan background (Yang's parents were career diplomats, and he has travelled widely throughout the world). But unlike most poets of his generation, the Misty Poets in particular, Yang has a passionate attachment to Chinese tradition. In his own words:

We are rooted in a common culture, in the unique form of a psychological structure. It is a form . . . [that] never determines the modernity of the subject matter, but instead dictates certain peculiar modes of feeling, thinking and expression. It commands our obedience in each act of artistic creation. I believe that no individual artist in his creative work can betray his [cultural] tradition. Either consciously or unconsciously, every artist's work . . . is to a greater or lesser degree permeated with the "intrinsic elements" of his tradition.

In this 1983 essay, Yang identifies the following features as part of what he calls the "eternal present" of Chinese culture: (1) China's "unique symbolic system," exemplified in the Classic of Changes ; (2) the "objectivity" of Chinese thought; (3) a philosophical inclination to synthesize (rather than to divide in an Aristotelian fashion); (4) a tradition of "transcending utilitarianism;" (5) a poetic conception of nature and natural imagery (what he terms "the unique visual language of Chinese poetry"--a consciousness of "multi-gradational concrete imagery"); (6) the "organic compound structure" of Chinese poetry, deriving from the ancient works of Qu Yuan; and (7) modes of thinking that include notions of both "enlightenment" (wu) and "tranquility" (jing). Most tradition-minded Chinese, I suspect, would agree with Yang.

The Evolution of Art in the Post-Mao Era

In most respects, artistic developments in the PRC after 1978 paralleled those of Chinese literature. Moving rapidly away from the stultifying confines of "socialist realism," artists experimented with all kinds of modern forms and styles. They sought intellectual and artistic inspiration in Western models, and they agonized over issues of national and personal identity. There were, however, significant differences in the experiences of Chinese artists and writers.

In the first place, most painters, sculptors and craftsmen were trained in state-supported academies, where they were socialized to prefer representational art over abstraction. As a group, then, they were perhaps not quite as experimental as their literary colleagues. Moreover, since public space has always been somewhat easier for the state to control than bookstalls and private bookshelves, Chinese artists have found it somewhat more difficult than writers to transgress the boundaries of government policy. And, of course, domestic market factors are not as important in the fine arts as they are in literature, since good paintings and good calligraphy are far more expensive than good books. Nonetheless, Chinese art in the post-Mao period has been marked by considerable creativity and vitality, not only in its media but also in its messages.

Naturally enough, the artwork of the late 1970s and early 1980s in China reflected many of the themes expressed in Scar Literature of the same period--notably, acts of cruelty and abuses of power during the Cultural Revolution. One representative "Scar Painting" of the time--Li Zhongli's "The Orphan"--shows a child kneeling on her bed with a broken violin at her side. She is gazing sadly at a photograph of her father, a musician (we assume), who has fallen victim to the Gang of Four. Another powerful work of the same genre, by Wang Tong, titled "Youth," depicts a little girl (the artist herself, she later revealed), sitting alone, looking forgotten and forlorn, amidst the chaotic wreakage of her once-peaceful home.

A number of paintings of the late 70s depict heroic individuals--notably Premier Zhou Enlai--who tried during the Cultural Revolution to resist or at least contain Maoist radicalism. In fact, the National Art Exhibit of October 1979 devoted an entire gallery to the dramatic events surrounding Zhou's death in early 1976. At that time the Chinese authorities had suppressed with deadly force a large-scale and spontaneous display of public affection for the late premier in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. A number of the paintings displayed in this gallery show young girls, the symbols of purity and innocence, being killed or injured while trying to defend the vast array of commemorative wreaths, banners and flowers placed at the foot of the famous Heros' Memorial in honor of "Uncle Zhou."

Not all Scar Painters concerned themselves with such heroic figures and grand themes. Indeed, many sought to depict "small" people, often peasants, who had experienced so much hardship and poverty under Mao. This focus on rural life produced a "Native Soil" movement in art, roughly analogous to the "Seeking Roots" movement in literature. According to one Chinese critic, however, in its later development the Native Soil movement became weakened by its "exaggerated focus on the exoticism of Chinese rural society." In his view, the tendency on the part of many artists to romanticize the "unique qualities" of the Chinese countryside had an increasingly cynical purpose: "to appeal to Western art galleries and collectors."

On the whole, Scar Painters and Native Soil Painters found their inspiration in classical European artists, particularly exponents of the 17th century Dutch School and 19th century French representational painters. They were also influenced by the French Neo-Classicists and by the American painter, Andrew Wyeth. But avant-garde artists in post-Mao China--notably the pioneering group known as the "Stars"--rebelled against precisely this sort of "academic realism." Their motto became: "Picasso is our banner, Kollwitz is our model." The French poet, Julien Blaine, after viewing their iconoclastic artistry in 1979, wrote: "Cut off from their ancestral roots by the Cultural Revolution, they looked to the West, and in a few months they reinvented everything: fauvism, cubism, impressionism, surrealism, Dada, expressionaism, pop-art and hyper-realism."

In an attempt to move beyond conventional Chinese conceptions of art, the Stars drew heavily upon unconventional symbolism in conveying their political, social and cultural messages. This symbolism was full of hidden meanings, deliberately echoing, it appears, the carefully crafted obscurity of the Misty Poets, and sometimes inspired directly by their poetic efforts. Thus, for example, a painting by Huang Rui carries Bei Dao's inspirational poem, "Our Every Morning Sun."

In their first officially sanctioned show, which ran for about ten days in late 1979, the Stars displayed 170 paintings, graphics and sculptures, including some nudes, abstractions and semi-abstractions. Although most Chinese viewers at the time did not understand this avant-garde approach to art, they welcomed a change from the narrow orthodoxy of the past. At least forty thousand people saw the show. For another year or so, the Stars exhibited their works in various places, challenging authority and promoting a vision of artistic freedom. By 1981, however, the group had begun to dissolve, and, in a pattern that would be repeated by many Chinese artists in the 1980s and 90s, a number of its most accomplished members--including Wang Keping, Ma Desheng, Li Shuang, Huang Rui, Ai Weiwei, Li Yan, and Qu Leilei--eventually left China for Europe, the United States, or other parts of Asia.

In all, the Stars represented a critical breakthrough in Chinese art, facilitating, or at least presaging, the so-called New Wave movement of 1985. Like many other groups of the 1980s, New Wave artists received substantial nourishment from Western philosophy and art. Strongly influenced by Marcel Duchamp, their aim was to subvert traditional Chinese aesthetics (see below). For some, this meant, quite literally, deconstructing their artistic productions. Huang Yongping, for instance, burned many of his works at exhibition sites in an attempt to "abandon art." Gu Wenda, for his part, turned Chinese characters into abstract symbols through a process of "dissection, displacement and reordering." In both of these cases, and in others as well, Daoism and Chan (Zen) Buddhism travelled comfortably, arm in arm, with the radical "Western" methods of Duchamp.

Several other artists of the mid-1980s sought to disorient their audiences through the "neo-Zen" use (or abuse) of language. Wu Bing, for example, playfully invented thousands of unfathomable Chinese characters out of radicals, creating huge hanging "texts" whose contents appeared to Chinese viewers at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. Wu Shanzhuan, also preoccupied with texts, combined lewd advertisements from Chinese alleyways with formats drawn from the "big-character posters" of the Cultural Revolution era.

Some New Wave artists--notably Gu Wenda, Zhang Peili, Zeng Fanzhi, Gu Dexin Guo Wei, Song Yonghong, Zhang Xiaogang, and A Xian--used embarrassing or otherwise discomfitting images to dismay or disgust their viewers. These images involved the depiction of voyeuristic intrusions, unwanted physical contact, unpleasant objects (including severed limbs and used tampons), pain, bondage, degeneracy, decay and death--recalling, of course, the shock tactics of China's "Experimentalist" writers. Another distinctive feature of the New Wave movement was its emphasis on performance art. As with Guo Wei's paintings, many performances focused on the theme of bondage--an obvious product of the repression so many artists have felt in China. Artists literally wrapped themselves with cloth, plastic, tape and other materials.

The year 1989 was a turning point in Chinese art, as it was in many other areas of Chinese life. In early February the prestigious China Art Gallery sponsored a "China/Avant-Garde" exhibit, in which nearly all of the major artists of the decade participated. On the opening day, to the surprise of everyone, the artists Tang Song and Xiao Lu fired shots at their own installation, creating chaos and temporarily closing the show. Although Tang and Xiao were both arrested, they were released after only three days--no doubt because they were both the offspring of high-level officials. This event highlighted the delicate issue of cadre privilege in Chinese society and it also marked the abrupt end of official support for avant-garde art in post-Mao China.

The disillusion of many artists upon the closing of this exhibit, compounded by the traumatic events at Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, gave birth to what has been termed "Cynical Realism" in China. This movement involved a rejection of the heroic idealism of the 1980s, and the adoption instead of a "roguish" (bopi) perspective on life--one characterized by themes of dissipation, indifference, jadedness and sarcasm. The "poster-boy" for this sort of alienated art might well be Fang Lijun, whose portraits of himself and his friends convey the mood of undisguised boredom. Liu Wei, a kindred spirit, created a series of distorted images of family members and army cadres, satirizing their self-important postures. One is, of course, reminded of the literary work of Wang Shuo.

Another response to the events of 1989 was a rapid growth in enthusiasm for "Political Pop." This movement had already begun in the mid- and late-80s, motivated by enthusiasm for the Pop art of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. But the early works of this particular genre--including irreverent paintings of Chairman Mao by artists such as Wang Guangyi, Liu Wei, Wang Ziwei and Yu Youhan--were not explicitly concerned with linking politics, popular fashions and mass culture. In 1990, however, Wang Guangyi began his "Great Criticism" series, which signalled a switch to a more humorous and genuinely "Pop" approach to political art.

In this series, which coincided with the rise of "Mao fever" in China, Wang juxtaposed slogans from the Cultural Revolution with the images and brand names of popular Western consumer products, such as Coca Cola and Canon cameras. At about the same time, Liu Dahong produced his "Four Seasons" series, which shows Chairman Mao in the midst of scenes inspired by recent political developments as well as traditional religious motifs, myths, operas, popular tales and folk customs. The inhabitants of these bizarre scenes range from comrades-in-arms and doting admirers to animals (both dead and alive), skeletons (alive) and a curious tourist. In 1992, Li Shan, famous for his use of pink and red paint to portray shockingly explicit sexual images, used echos of this "rouge" imagery to produce obviously androgynous portraits of Chairman Mao. Another Pop artist, Feng Mengbao, took characters from the "revolutionary operas" of the Cultural Revolution period and showed them as video game figures.

Despite the limited appreciation for abstract art in contemporary China, there have been a number of able practitioners in the 90s, including Shen Qin, Shang Yang, Wang Chuan, Liu Ming, and Xu Anming. Shen's "minimalist" works reflect the techniques of traditional ink painting and calligraphy (see below), although they bear no trace of representation. Shang's abstract oil paintings suggest a spiritual quality, derived from his interest in traditional Chinese philosophy. Wang's geometric figures emphasize what he refers to "spiritual absurdity"--the "unresolvable contradictions [which] are the most exquisite aspects of art, and the reason for our undying quest." Liu Ming's works of hand-made paper, by contrast, represent a movement away from any sort of spiritual concerns and toward a preoccupation with the material properties of his chosen medium. Xu's haunting canvesses, with their earthy yellow colors and lower tones of black and grey, convey the feeling of something that, as he puts the matter, "still exists in life though the thing itself has been erased--like memories of old photographs."

From the mid-1990s onward, commercial developments in China have created ever more opportunities for artists to display and sell their wares. New galleries for contemporary art have arisen in all major Chinese cities, and a number of lesser ones as well. Some of these galleries, such as ShanghART in Shanghai, even have their own websites (http://www.shanghart.com/). The on-line brochure of the gallery tells us:

Shanghai with its cosmopolitan past and its rapidly developing economy . . . [is] an ideal place to experience the re-emergence of China's creative talents who are exploring new methods and mediums, capturing and interpreting the energy and spirit of China on the cusp of the 21st century.

Chinese art is heir to a long tradition which is now challenged and enriched by . . . [its] confrontation with the international art world. Artists today are trying to define their position and artistic identity in a country becoming increasingly international, modern, consumer-oriented and media-exposed.

In a similar vein, the art critic, Hou Hanru notes:

Today [1997], economic, cultural and even political life in China is shifting extremely rapidly. A "Socialist Market Economy" is being created; and a related system of social reorganisation is taking place. The most visible and typical phenomenon of such a fervent development is the speed of construction in cities of different scales. Connected to this is the expansion and explosion of urban space and metropolitanization. [ . . . ] It is a process of re-negotiation between the established [Chinese] social structure and influences of foreign, especially Western, models of social structure, values and ways of living. These models are mostly imported via images produced by the mass media of Hong Kong, Taiwan and other overseas Chinese connections.

These urban developments have engendered widespread anxiety, which contemporary artists have exploited quite effectively. The former New Wave artist, Zhang Peili, for instance, has drawn upon his stock-in-trade--unsettling images and "black humor"--to express this sort of discomfort. Zhang's video installation, "Uncertain Pleasure," uses close-ups of a man relentlessly scratching his body in order to reflect the tension that exists between the joys and frustrations of modern urban life. Zhou Tiehai, a Shanghai-based artist, employs a diverse range of media--from opaque watercolors to various modern technologies, including the internet--to highlight the pervasive influence of international artistic, cultural and commercial forces. In his "Cover" series, he uses a computer to regenerate his own image on the front of major international magazines like Newsweek and Time . One reconstituted Newsweek cover bears his portrait and the ironic subtitle "Too Materialistic; Too Spiritualized."

Urban dislocations in China have inspired a variety of artistic responses. The Beijing-based artist, Zhu Jia, for example, has produced a video titled "Forever," in which he highlights the profound sense of disorientation occasioned by rapid modernization. Zhu filmed the piece by attaching a camera to the wheel of a bicycle and then riding the bicycle throughout the capital. This sequence of fragmented images strikingly depicts the "deconstruction" of the city and the rise of a chaotic new world. In Shi Yong's innovative street performance, "City Space: Moving--Leaping 12 Hours," Shi walks the major avenues of Shanghai, receiving periodic calls from people in public phone booths, who tell him where to go next. The result is an arbitrary and unsettling itinerary over which he has absolutely no control. At each point along the way Shi has to redefine his own position and plans, symbolically remaking himself in response to outside imperatives.

In Guangzhou, Lin Yilin combined production and performance to highlight the problems of disruption and dislocation. In "Maneuver across the Lin He Road," he erected a brick wall on one side of the busy thoroughfare, and then transported this structure, brick by brick, across the street. The traffic, both a symptom and symbol of urban development, was naturally interrupted for several hours, until he had finally moved the wall to the other side, where he rebuilt it. The physical labor of the artist, and the traffic jam that it created, suggest the agonizing frustrations that modernization entails.

Yin Xiuzhen's approach to urban renewal was to create an immense installation called "The Ruined Capital" (a play on the title of Jia Pingwa's racey novel, perhaps). For this display, she collected old furniture and debris from various destroyed houses in her Beijing neighborhood, and then reconstituted them to produce a poetic and strangely nostalgic scene reminiscent of a shattered city. Zhan Wang, in a work called "Ruin Cleaning Project '94," dealt with the theme of destruction in a somewhat different way. One day, in October of 1994, he cleaned the remaining walls, windows and doors of a partially destroyed house in Beijing and redecorated them with paint. Soon thereafter--as he must have known would be the case--the house was leveled.

A year later, Zhan and two colleagues went through the ruins of the Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, demolished after the land it had occupied for so many years was sold to a Hong Kong developer. In order to say their "last farewell" to a place that had once housed China's most important art school, the artists collected the debris and built a "sculpture park."

Tradition and Transformation in Chinese Art

Although much of contemporary Chinese art reveals a clear debt to the West, the Open Policy has also encouraged the revitalization of tradition. Both the classical fine arts--ink painting and calligraphy--and craft productions--including woodblock prints, textiles, bone-carving, woodwork, bamboo, metalwork, lacquerware, ceramics, enamels, jades, and other forms of jewelry and decoration--no longer reflect Maoist political themes. The result has been far more experimentation in traditional-style painting and calligraphy and a much greater responsiveness to domestic and international market forces in the case of both arts and crafts. Mass markets do not always encourage the highest standards of artistic production, but they undoubtedly indicate canons of popular taste.

Traditional artistic symbols, drawn from language (including puns and stylized characters), philosophy, religion, history, popular mythology, and, of course, nature itself, continue to resonate strongly with most contemporary Chinese--even those of a relatively "modern" temper. The most powerful and positive animal symbol in China remains the dragon (long), connoting benevolence, power, longevity, prosperity, and the renewal of life. The phoenix (fenghuang) is the feminine counterpart, symbolizing peace and joy. The unicorn (qilin) symbolizes good luck and prosperity; the tortoise (gui), strength, endurance, and longevity. Together, these beasts, only the last of which has a Chinese name that lends itself to any sort of accurate translation in English, are known as the "Four Spiritual Animals."

At a somewhat more mundane level, tigers symbolize military prowess and protection. Lions, usually standing in male-female pairs, serve as guardians at the entrance of traditional-style buildings. The deer symbolizes longevity (by virtue of its supposed ability to find a life-prolonging fungus) and wealth (because the character for deer, lu, sounds like another character meaning "official salary"). A similar pun on the sound yu invests the fish with the symbolic meaning of "abundance." Yet another pun makes bats (fu) the symbol for good luck and prosperity. Cranes symbolize longevity; swallows, success; and the quail, courage in adversity. Mandarin ducks indicate conjugal affection; the wild goose conjures up feelings of sadness and longing; and roosters, hens, and chickens symbolize family prosperity. In the insect world, the cicada stands as a common symbol of fertility and rebirth. The butterfly signifies joy and warmth; the dragonfly, weakness and instability, but also longevity, again by virtue of a pun.

The most prominent plant symbol in China, past and present, is bamboo. It symbolizes the scholar--upright, strong and resilient, yet gentle, graceful, and refined. The pine tree suggests longevity and solitude; the plum tree, fortitude and respect for old age. The willow, like the wild goose, indicates parting and sorrow, while the cassia tree, like the carp, suggests literary success. Of various popular fruits, the peach has wide-ranging significance. It symbolizes marriage, spring, justice, and especially Daoist immortality. The apple signifies peace (a pun on the sound ping); the persimmon, joy; the pomegranate, fertility. Popular flower symbols include the chrysanthemum (happiness, longevity, and integrity), the peony (love and good fortune), the plum blossom (courage and hope), the wild orchid (humility and refinement), and the lotus (purity and detachment from worldly cares)--a predominantly Buddhist symbol.

Plants and animals are often grouped together in Chinese arts and crafts--the phoenix and the peony, for example, to indicate opulence; the chrysanthemum and the grouse, to connote good fortune; the heron and the lotus, to symbolize integrity. Larger groupings are common as well. As the "Three Friends of Winter," the bamboo, plum, and pine signify enduring friendship, as well as the harmony of the "Three Teachings" (Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism). The plum, wild orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum are known as the "Four Gentlemen"--beloved by gardeners, poets, artists, scholars, and craftsmen.

The fine arts in China have long been characterized by a remarkable feeling for natural beauty, perfection of form, grace, and refinement. They are also noteworthy for their optimism, love of nature, and organic quality. Much of the formal aesthetics of traditional Chinese art developed out of an emphasis on the proper balance of yin and yang, terms which in traditional Chinese aesthetics signify complementary opposition and harmonious balance: dark and light, cold and hot, falling and rising, passive and active, concave and convex, square and round.

In premodern China, creative endeavor was never far removed from tradition; indeed, ancient artistic models possessed universal and transcendent value. Thus, paintings and calligraphic productions had to conform to rigid rules of composition, set down in classic texts that are still studied today. In accordance with yinyang principles, landscape artists were encouraged to dip downward before coming up; to turn upwards before going down; to intersperse sparse with dense and dark with light; to relieve thick ink with thin, to counteract the convex with the concave, and so forth. The point of such juxtapositions in Chinese painting was not merely to create contrast, however. Primarily it was to indicate the rhythm of nature--the endlessly alternating rise and fall, expansion and contraction, activity and quiescence, of yin and yang.

Vital brushwork, possessed of "spirit" (qi), distinguished "live" art from "dead" art. Painters and calligraphers had no margin for error, however, for once their ink-laden brush touched paper or silk, they made an irretrievable commitment.

In Chinese cultural life, calligraphy continues to be a measure of refinement. As in times past, calligraphy can be found everywhere in contemporary China. It graces private homes, shops, teahouses, restaurants, and official buildings, in addition to old temples, monasteries, and imperial palaces. It is engraved on metal, wood, and stone and even the face of rocks and mountains. Chinese critics generally distinguish six main styles of calligraphy: (1) big seal ancient script, (2) small seal ancient script, (3) clerical script, (4) regular or standard script, (5) running script, and (6) grass-style script. Of these, the last two are the most susceptible to individualized interpretation. All of Chairman Mao's calligraphic inscriptions, which can still be found on many public buildings (including Party headquarters in Beijing) and school grounds, are in either the running script or the grass-style script.

Traditional-style ink painting, often called National Painting (guohua), has continued to flourish in China even during the most radical periods of iconoclasm. But in the People's Republic prior to 1978, artists were generally discouraged from doing old-style landscapes, bamboo, birds and flowers. Instead, they were urged to depict China's "new socialist man." If they were allowed to paint traditional subjects, they had to select symbolic themes that were compatible with the state's upbeat self-image: plum blossoms, indicating the awakening of spring; gnarled pine trees, symbolizing strength and endurance; landscapes illustrating a line from one of Chairman Mao's poems. Artists who painted works that were considered dark and gloomy ran a genuine risk of political persecution.

This situation improved remarkably and rapidly after 1978. In the post-Mao era, as in pre-Liberation times, National Painting had a number of regional exponents. In Beijing, most of the great masters had passed from the scene by the time of Mao's death. The most famous survivors were probably Li Kuchan, known for his exquisite bird and flower paintings, and Li Keran, justly renowned for his "pure" landscapes, water buffalos, and herd-boys. Another highly regarded Beijing painter of the old school was Huang Yongyu, whose bold landscapes and delicate flower studies during the 1980s gained him a considerable following, both at home and abroad.

Among the most innovative artists in post-Mao Beijing has been Wu Guangzhong, who once studied oil-painting in Paris in 1950 but shifted from oils to National Painting in the 1960s. His inkwork during the 60s and 70s was relatively conventional, but by the 1980s he had began to experiment enthusiastically, producing broad, sweeping washes of trees, landscapes, houses and even the Great Wall. These renderings remain recognizable, yet they have a decidedly abstract quality. Another talented and innovative National Painter of the post-Mao era is Yang Yanping, a former architecture student, whose works in ink display remarkable sensitivity and power. Both her figure paintings and her depictions of rocks and plants are full of emotion, and her creative use of ancient-style characters, grouped together in unusual combinations, invests her calligraphic productions with extraordinary vitality.

To the west of Beijing, rimmed by the rugged Taihang mountain range, is the remote province of Shaanxi. There, at the prestigious Xi'an Academy, landscape artists have developed a distinctive regional style of National Painting. One of the most courageous and innovative early exponents of this so-called Shaanxi School was Shi Lu, who had been persecuted almost to death during the Cultural Revolution. (One of Shi's "crimes" was to paint a landscape, titled "Shifting to Fight in North Shaanxi," which showed Mao "separated from the masses" and about to fall off a cliff.) Although Shi died in the summer of 1982, his intense and eccentric landscapes mark him as a major figure in northern painting. Another talented artist of the Shaanxi School is Jia Youfa, a one-time student of Li Keran. Jia's powerful and passionate renderings of the Taihang Mountains are, in the words of Michael Sullivan, "among the most successful efforts of guohua artists to escape from convention to evoke, subjectively, . . . the true character of the northern landscape."

To the south, in cosmopolitan Shanghai, several surviving masters of the old school, including Zhu Qizhan, Xie Zhilu, Cheng Shifa and Lu Yanshao, helped to revitalize National Painting there during the 1980s and 90s. Zhu, the oldest of these talented individuals (b. 1892), had once studied Western art in Japan (where he especially admired van Gogh and Matisse) before giving up oil painting for ink. Although his landscapes, bamboo and flowers are clearly in the traditional guohua style, their striking colors and composition testify to Zhu's earlier Western training. Xie is best known for his enormous technical skill and eclecticism, as well as the refinement of his flowers and landscapes. Cheng excels in figure painting, displaying a lively and sensitive brush. Lu, an amateur painter and seal carver, who spent the early 1950s drawing comic strips and cartoons, eventually gained the attention of the great southern guohua painter, Pan Tianshou, and became an extremely acomplished landscape artist.

In nearby Nanjing, where landscape artists have long found their inspiration in the majestic cluster of mountains known as Huangshan, Fu Baoshi, the great master who died in 1965, brought local landscape painting to a level it had not witnessed for about two hundred years. But so dominant was Fu's influence that few painters of the Nanjing School have been able to escape it. One major exception is Ya Ming, whose turbulent, expressionistic landscapes display powerful rhythms and rich contrasts of ink. Although sent to the countryside for four years during the Cultural Revolution, Ya is now a dominant member of the Jiangsu Artists Association, with a major following both at home and abroad. Much further to the south, in the city of Guangzhou, the comparatively conservative Lingnan School continues to boast many able practitioners, including Guan Shanyue, Cai Dizhi, Wang Li and Liu Lun, whose traditional-style works reflect the warm luxuriance of their southern environment.

In addition to the regionally oriented artists mentioned above, a few of China's more eccentric landscape painters might also be noted here--individuals based in major cities but not particularly identified with local artistic traditions: Huang Yongyu's elder brother, Huang Yongyuan (Hefei, Anhui), well-known for painting huge and wild landscapes; the recklessness and playful Li Huashan (Chongqing, Sichuan), who, despite his legendary individualism and arrogance, has been repeatedly been honored by the Chinese artistic establishment for his innovative and challenging work; and finally, Tian Liming, a teacher at the Central Academy in Beijing. Tian's claim to fame rests with his daring ink paintings which, in the words of a Chinese critic, "blend nudes with misty landscapes in such a way that at first glance the nudes are indistinguishable from the landscapes."

Woodblocks, Comic Art and Advertisements

Although painting and calligraphy remain firmly at the top of contemporary China's aesthetic pecking order, other visual arts enjoy a far wider circulation. Chinese woodblock prints, for example, which reached their technological apex during the Ming dynasty and then declined somewhat, are still a ubiquitous feature of Chinese folk art, especially in the countryside. Perhaps the most familiar use of this time-honored technology, aside from providing illustrations for books of all kinds, is for producing "New Year's pictures" and various religious items, including door guardians, paper portraits of household deities, and "spirit money" for sacrifices. From 1949 until the late 1970s, New Year's pictures in the PRC conveyed purely secular messages, and religious prints of any kind were actively discouraged. During the Cultural Revolution in particular a great many ancient woodblocks were wantonly destroyed on the grounds that they bore "superstitious" images.

The inauguration of the Open Policy in 1978 changed all this. Today, traditional-style woodblock prints can be found almost everywhere in China. The most popular deities represented in peasant homes (and in ertain urban dwellings as well, especially in the south), are the Kitchen God, the God of Wealth, and various door guardians. The Kitchen God occupies a place of special significance in the household during New Year's celebrations, but many peasant homes display his image all year long. The God of Wealth, known by different names and appearing in a variety forms, is often shown under a money tree, surrounded by children. Door guardians, commonly displayed in ferocious-looking pairs, are particularly prevalent on the outside of rural dwellings in South China.

As their name implies, door gods are designed to frighten away evil spirits, a tradition going back to at least the Han dynasty. Some guardians ride horses or other animals; others stand at attention. Almost all look fearsome, with stern faces and sharp weapons held at the ready. The most common historical figures pasted on Chinese doors are Hu Jingde and Qin Shubao, ministers of a famous Tang dynasty emperor. Many other guardian figures, nameless yet still potent, display the painted masks of characters in traditional Chinese opera and bear flags on their backs, symbolizing the status of a general. Normally, fresh door guardians are pasted up each new year. Other popular New Year's prints include symbols of good fortune, such as "unicorns," fish, and healthy children holding money.

Unlike many other Chinese crafts, woodblock printing cannot easily be practiced at home, since it requires the efforts of at least three people, each with distinctly different skills: a designer, a wood-carver, and a printer. For polychrome prints, the designer usually makes about a half dozen sketches of his final design--one for each color to be used and one for the black outlines. These sketches are then pasted onto blocks of wood, which the carver renders into the required design, digging away all parts of the surface area except those where a given color will appear. The printer then applies the appropriate ink to each block, and thereafter, the paper. The final step, when the print has dried, is to add minute details by hand, a job usually undertaken by relatively unskilled members of the local community.

Like woodblock printing, to which it bears a close relationship, comic art can be traced back for many hundreds of years in China. The tradition of telling stories with cartoon-like illustrations dates from the Han period, if not earlier, and for centuries Chinese children have read strip picture books of famous Ming and Qing novels. During the Qing period, even prominent painters sometimes produced what may be described as political cartoons. The legendary eccentric, Zhu Da, for instance, once depicted local government officials as ugly peacocks standing on an unstable, egg-shaped rock, waiting awkwardly for the emperor to pass by.

In the late nineteenth century, Western-style newspapers in the Chinese language began to appear in treaty port areas. A number of these publications incorporated cartoons and other caricatures, contributing to their overall popularity. By the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly during the New Culture Movement and its aftermatch, cartoons and comic strips had become staples of the Chinese popular press. By 1937, Chinese cartoonists had succeeded in establishing their own national association, and during the anti-Japanese War of 1937-1945, cartoons proved to be a potent propaganda weapon.

During the Maoist period, "people's comic books" and so-called comic strips (lit., "serial pictures") served the interests of the state in two essential ways. One was to popularize orthodox interpretations of China's recent history, celebrating the achievements of the Chinese Communist Party and canonizing its heros. The other was to ridicule enemies of the PRC, both at home and abroad. Wang Zhaowen, a leading art theoretician of the 1950s, wrote that it was the "sacred duty" of Chinese cartoonists to use their art in the service of the masses, encouraging hatred for class enemies within and for imperialist aggressors without. Comic art thus acquired a certain social and political respectibility, as long as it followed the Party line. Indeed, Feng Zikai, who had gained widespread fame in the 1930s and 40s for his reflective and insightful anti-Japanese cartoons, was appointed head of the Institute of Chinese Painting and President of the Shanghai Branch of the Chinese Artists' Association in the early 1960s.

The Cultural Revolution, however, subjected a number of prominent cartoonists, including Feng, to violent and prolonged attack for their "bourgeois" outlook and values. Many artists never recovered from the strain. China's "ten years of chaos" (1966-1976) also greatly reduced the scope of serial picture books. Between 1949 and 1963, nearly 13,000 different titles of these works appeared in print, but in 1972, less than 150 were published.

Not surprisingly, Chinese cartoonists had a field day after the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976. During the next year or two, caracatures of Jiang Qing and her associates appeared in seemingly endless proliferation, an veritable orgy of state-approved vilification. One of the most striking cartoons of the period shows the four villains, dressed primitively like cavemen, dancing wildly around a huge fire. The fire is fed by copies of Western literary, artistic and scientific works as well as the great Chinese classics; above it hangs a steaming cauldron, with a live person inside.

During the comparatively "liberal" 1980s, cartoonists enjoyed considerable artistic freedom. So open was the environment that even the cartoons of Taiwan-born Cai Zhizhong (Tsai Chih Chung), which had long-delighted Chinese residents of Hong Kong, began to circulate on the Mainland, gaining a large and devoted following. Cai's specialties are illustrated versions of famous philosophical and popular works in the Chinese tradition, ranging from the Confucian Analects to Pu Songling's Strange Tales of Liaozhai . Like "Classic Comics" in the West, Cai's works have introduced a wide range of sophisticated "classics" to more popular audiences in China.

The situation for political cartoonists was somewhat different, however. Liao Bingxiong's famous color cartoon of 1979, "Himself Liberated after Nineteen Years," suggests the basic problem. It depicts a man so constrained by the ceramic shell of government censorship that even after the shell is finally broken, he cannot move. The omnipresent threat of a crackdown by the state encouraged this sort of self-censorship.

Cynthia E. Bled's analysis of 356 cartoons that appeared in the People's Daily during 1982 provides one indication of the new lattitude state-employed cartoonists enjoyed as well as the limits they imposed upon themselves. Most closely followed the government line in celebrating Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, the Open Policy, and the Hundred Flowers policy. They celebrated campaigns to promote politeness and civility, condemned selfishness, greed and crimal behavior, discouraged "feudal superstitions," and made fun of those who slavishly admired foreign things. A number also satirized the new breed of writers, artists and critics for their hastily composed works and economic self-interest. But among the objects of their pointed criticism were also corrupt cadres, bureaucratic inefficiency and government indifference.

By the mid-1980s, political, social and cultural critiques had become quite common in China, even in government-sponsored newspapers and magazines. Cartoonists had also began to poke mild fun at individual political leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang. One cartoon in the official Liberation Daily in 1986 went so far as to show Deng, an avid bridge player, with a handful of cards marked "Chinese-style modernization." But it was the wide open intellectual and political climate of early 1989 that gave the fullest scope to cartoonists and satirists. Indeed, a number of the posters and banners displayed during the mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square bore caracatures of high-ranking Chinese leaders, most of them highly unflattering. The harsh suppression of the Tiananmen demonstrations on June 4 chilled the atmosphere for all Chinese artists, including cartoonists, although within a couple of years the climate had changed significantly and the cartoonists reemerged as active social and political critics.

One relatively safe target for contemporary satirists is China's insatiable consumer society, with its blatant commercialism and its aggressive, often irresponsible, advertising. Even during the initial phases of public advertising in the early 1980s, Chinese cartoonists took direct aim at those who promoted unworthy products or made misleading claims. Zhu Changqing, for instance, straightforwardly satirized "false front" ads by depicting a devious-looking man holding up the image of a beautiful woman in front of his face. "I'm not old, reads the caption."

It was not, however, until promulgation of China's comprehensive Advertising Law in October, 1994, that the state gave systematic attention to problems of exaggeration and unsubstantiated commercial claims. Article 4 states unambiguously: "Advertisements shall not contain false contents, and shall not deceive or mislead consumers." Although severe penalties have been specified for breaches of such stipulations, government enforcement remains haphazard.

At present, visual advertisements can be found everywhere in urban China--on television, in the streets, and in publications of all kinds. In some major cities huge public television screens display video images promoting various commercial products non-stop. The contrast with the nearly total absence of public advertising during the late 70s is striking.

In 1996 the state began to produce its own magazine, Modern Advertising , devoted solely to the development of this fledgling art form in China. As might be expected, many of the short, punchy articles in this slick publication reflect official policy. The first four pieces that appear in the second issue of 1997, for example, deal explicitly with the question of China's "spiritual civilization." (The heavy-handed title of the lead article is: "It Will Not Do to Advertise Without [Attention to] Spiritual Civilization.") Other articles explore ethical issues, such as whether strong alcoholic drinks should be advertised on television. But a number of pieces are concerned with nothing more than how to make Chinese advertising more persuasive--how, for instance, to put "soul" (linghun) into a product, how to draw lessons from previously successful ad campaigns, and how to use Chinese idioms and Western-style brand names most effectively. Several of these articles draw on modern survey research and refer to the marketing experiences of foreign as well as domestic firms.

Public advertisements in contemporary China display a high level of sophistication. Some draw on traditional symbols and imagery (historical and mythological figures, animals, famous places, etc., often depicted in cartoon form); others employ more "modern" images, including photographs of fashionable men and women--either Chinese or Westerners. Some use foreign and domestic elements in judicious combination. A locally produced ad in a small Beijing shop cleverly shows, for example, the traditional Chinese character for "spring" in which the "sun" element has been replaced by a Coca Cola can. Another, more "professional ad," for Bayer dental products in Guangzhou, shows a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, with a caption in Chinese asking: "With teeth like this, would the Mona Lisa have been so famous?" Such ads, which assume a certain familiarity with Western culture, have become increasingly popular in rcent years.

Significantly, China's Advertising Law of 1994 stipulates that certain things will not be allowed in Chinese or foreign advertisements. Among them: Any renderings of the national flag, the national emblem or the national anthem of the PRC. Advertisers are also prohibited from using the name of any state organ or state official, or employing terms such as "state level," "supreme," or the "very best." Ads must not in any way "adversely affect social stability" or "jeopardize the social order;" they may not "harm public interests," go against prevailing social customs, contain "obscenity, superstition, horror, violence or social evils," involve ethnic, racial, religious or sex discrimination, or obstruct the protection of China's environmental and natural resources. Furthermore, advertising must not damage "the physical and mental health of minors and the handicapped." However, as with various other stipulations of the Advertising Law, the state seems incapable of systematically enforcing its own rules.